Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
